Field of Disclosure
This disclosure relates to the fields of real-time voice and video communication and anticipatory computing.
Description of the Related Art
As mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets grow in popularity, the demand for smarter and more efficient communications and collaboration tools is also growing. While email, telephone, and video conferencing software are popular tools for collaboration, these tools do not leverage the computing power of client devices and cloud services to enhance the collaborative process. For example, while text-based search services are commonplace today, typing queries on mobile devices during a collaborative session is often inconvenient and impractical. Voice-based interfaces to search engines are similarly unhelpful since capturing specific search instructions from users during a voice call or video call may be disruptive to the flow of a conversation. For instance, a user may speak into their phone during a conference call to explicitly ask a search engine for information related to some relevant topic. However, such a voice-input scheme is not sufficient for many users since interrupting the conference call is disruptive and explicitly specifying all the appropriate search terms verbally to retrieve relevant search results may be excessively cumbersome and time-consuming when the desired results are based on many different, context-specific terms.